Do you realize that Mother Nature recycles 100% of everything she creates? When it comes to our particular situation with the seven families live on our V6 ranch, about every two to three weeks the consumptive side of all that live here will fill a dump trailer that is 18’ long by 8’ wide by 4’ high. This is about a ton or so of all that I call mostly “convenient trash” to our local Paso Robles landfill. Mother Nature on the other hand, will recycle 100% of all her “stuff” like leaves on a tree and finally the trunk, every pile of poop left on top of the ground. She doesn’t bury anything 6’ deep in a casket that may take a hundred years to decompose and when all is decomposed it’s too deep in the ground to benefit most soil borne organisms. Mother Nature also has a very large scavenger population that is constantly cleaning up all of our roadkill accidents, the old, and the terminally sick in the never ending circle of life fed by the longest lasting source of energy that any of us know about, the sun. 

           But we humans think we have devised better ways to live with Mother Nature that are based on convenience and necessity at the cheapest cost possible so our convenient society can function as though nobody should ever have to sweat or toil. The problem with that is, friction will always oppose motion so somebody will eventually have to get up and go to work. Whoever said “there's no such thing as a free lunch” was right on, even though there are politicians out there that would have you believe otherwise. So the constant mining of our natural resources that we inherited hundreds of thousands of years ago without recycling won’t work. 

           But there are answers. It's called a “brain” and the nice thing is that everyone gets one. 

          I believe we can “have our cake and eat it too” sort of. But, and it’s a big but, we must start doing a much better job of recycling our STUFF. Because if we don’t someday all the stuff we need and don’t need will become evermore scarce, leading to evermore fear that I’ve got mine and I’ll fight a war to keep you from getting mine. How about instead we put great effort with our brains fully engaged and a universal realization that we can use the law of “the conservation of matter” to our advantage. This allows all the natural atoms that make up an object cannot be created or destroyed but we can move them around and change them into different particles as an example. If you take two atoms of Hydrogen, an invisible gas and one atom of Oxygen also an invisible gas and mix them in the right way you will have WATER and therein lies our salvation. The law of the conservation of matter says we can change the unsustainable way we do things today into sustainable ways for tomorrow. Right now, this very minute, I just opened up a package of M&M candies. The package measures 3” by 3.5” and is called the “fun size” and has 18 of M&M candies without peanuts. The package that I am now holding is pure plastic all slick and shiny and my guess is that this package will be around for many years to come. The candies are in my belly now and my digestive juices are extracting all the sugar from them. The remaining portion will mix with other foods that came probably wrapped in some sort of plastic wrapping also. My guess is that all the plastic most likely cost more than the food inside their wrappings. The journey my M&M’s will take will be to the local sewage treatment plant and back to Mother Earth but the package they came in will live on for God only knows how many years. 

             I believe that we must start by taking better care of “soil life” for without healthy soils we won’t be able to feed our present 7 billion souls 3 square meals a day. So once we have our 7 billion fed we can move on to solving the multitudinous number of other problems that plastic in its present form confronts us with. But remember that “matter can neither be created nor destroyed, only changed” So we must change which can be scary, as we look for answers in places where our imaginations lead us to places that we have never been before. 

         So what might some of these changes look like? First, the obvious one. I want governments to start  by putting monetary deposits big enough on all “our stuff” so the discarded stuff will always be profitable enough for someone to take the time to carry an old stove etc to the scrap yard where it can be recycled. A worn out television,a refrigerator, or a mattress, that if an owner leaves them by the roadside somebody else will want to pick them up for the deposit. Then encourage the manufacturers where possible to make  all our “stuff” more biodegradable, not like Styrofoam that I understand can take a thousand years to decompose. Our laws and regulations that encourage waste need to be amended. An example happened to me on a ranch that I was running my cattle on. One of my steers died out on the pasture and a county official passing by told me I had to bury this 800 pounds of protein that would be welcomed by all the scavengers like the buzzard, the Coyotes, the Raccoon, Bears and the many other scavengers that needed to fill their bellies with nourishing protein. I told the official that I couldn’t in good conscience heed his demand because the smell of death would be unfair to put upon a neighboring landowner who would have to smell it for a few days. For me his nose was not as important as feeding all the scavengers. By the time my obstructive way’s that went on for several days had been dealt with, the steer had been devoured along with its smell and only bones were left, to decompose putting a measure of Calcium back into the soil.  

              There’s an old saying “where there’s a will there’s a way” tells me that with enough thought put into solving the “unknown” the necessary answers will make themselves known. But we must be willing to change many of our habits for this to happen. So I close with “no change, no future.” 

                      See Ya, 

                       Jack